I know, I know. This morning I was all “Dude, I’m doing NaNoWriMo and you won’t see me for a month! Like, I am just writing my novel and that’s it. No household chores, no bathing, no voting, no nothing if it has nothing to do with my awesome book.”

But then I spotted a contest. Something shiny off the novel-path. And I was distracted. And I entered it. (By the way, I also bathed AND voted today, so I really got distracted. But don’t worry, I stayed true to the whole “no housework” thing… ask Jon, the house is a wreck.)

The contest is here at Scribbit’s blog. You can enter any post of yours with two things in mind: Thanksgiving, and starting with the letter “f”. So I picked “food”. And then I picked one of my many posts about pumpkin pie. Because I had several of them to choose from… as I was really on a pie bender a few weeks ago.  Fingers crossed, I could win some really yummy smelling prizes! Maybe one of them will smell like pie…

And now — FOR REAL! — I am going back to my book. Seriously, for real. No more bathing or voting starting…….. NOW!

I’ve officially signed up for this:

While several of my blogging acquaintances are doing the NaBloPoMo thing (which is crazily committing to posting daily on your blog for the entire month of November) I have committed to finishing my novel this month. And while I’ve already got huge chunks of it pieced together, the idea is to work on it daily and have a completed 50,000 word manuscript by the end of the month. And for me, I’d also like to have some hefty revision done by the 3oth as well. It’s just the final push I need to actually get it finished! (Because — if you didn’t already know this about me — I have a zillion scattered ideas, but I have a very hard time with follow-through. I believe the left side of my brain is totally non-functioning.) I already have my rough-draft-readers at the ready, emailing and Facebooking me periodically saying “Hey, is that rough draft ready yet?” Well, um, no, ladies. But soon. Very soon. The final push is at hand. And until I am finished, the blog will stagnate and grow some weeds, and you won’t find me skulking around Facebook so much, and I quite possibly won’t be answering my phone (sometimes that’s just because I can’t find the phone, though, even though I hear it ringing… because it is now very hard to bend down and look under furniture for the stupid, ringy thing). Out with all of the distractions! And that includes laundry. And feeding my kids.

I’m looking for a cool little widget that updates my word count daily. So that if you are at all interested, you can keep tabs on my progress.

So if you’ve always wanted to write a book… jump on the wagon!

What happens when corporate meets spooky? When you mix one part money, two parts raw creativity, and hundreds of non-work-related man-hours? Well, it’s what happens when your hubby’s company, Omniture, throws an INSANE Halloween party…

And when it’s all set up and constructed — before all the employees kids show up for trick or treating — the news teams show up and do a little report about it.  (Click here to watch, and then select “Halloween Bash 2″ and “Casey at Halloween Bash”. Jon can be seen in a wizard costume when the camera pans over the costumed employees.)  Then family and friends are given wrist bands to get into the party (lest hundreds of uninvited folks wander in and take all the candy… which I guess actually happened last year). You have to remember while watching these clips that this is an office. Where you see a forest and a western village and saloon… there are normally cubicles and conference rooms. I suppose you have to see it normally to really appreciate the amazing transformation. It was crazy. It was a huge production. There was a butt load of candy and awesomeness. Also? About 3,000 people. Easily.

Jon’s department did the whole “forest” theme. There was Sherwood forest, Charlie the Unicorn and Candy Mountain, a dragon cave (with a fantastic smoke-breathing dragon made by Jon’s friend, Devin), a midevel kingdom… and yeah, that was just their department. The “forest” was achieved, in part, by everyone donating their Christmas trees. (It’s now lunchtime Saturday and Jon is over at the office doing take-down… and trying to find our Christmas tree.) Jon specifically helped work on the Charlie the Unicorn and Candy Mountain part of it. If you have never seen this stupid video… count yourself lucky. It is amazingly annoying. But then again,  you should watch all three and a half eye-bleeding minutes of it to really appreciate how well they recreated it. Jon’s creative coworker made the liopleurodon, which turned out frickin rad. Jon built the bridge in our garage with the wood that we’ve been saving to build our shed (but seriously? when were we going to get around to the shed?). I assisted. And when I say “assisted”, I mean that I tried to help but almost took off one of Jon’s fingers with the skil saw… and then again with the drill. (After that, I was only allowed to measure things with the tape measure.)

Here’s the video I took of the Candy Mountain section:

The whole thing was much cooler than my pictures let on. Also, it was wall-to-wall people, so it was a little more difficult to get some good shots.  Other departments did Candyland, Ghost Busters, V for Vendetta, Batman, Super Mario Bros, U of U v/s BYU (yeah, there was a football field brought inside, with real grass), Men in Black, and a dozen other things. Some pics are up on flickr)  Here are a few of my shots:

So after all of that, you’d assume my kids wouldn’t need or want any more candy or excitement, right?

Wrong.

They went trick-or-treating around the neighborhood. Jachin went with a couple of his friends. His one friend (the vampire) had a cell phone on him, so Jachin called me. I told him to be home by 8 o’clock, to which he replied, “What?!? But mom, it’s a weekend!” Yeah, he’s 9. Yeah, I already feel like I have a teenager. It was a weird moment. I told him to be home by 9, or he was grounded from taking the car for a month. That confused him. But he was home by 9. (But then he went back to the vampire’s house for a “late night”… because they were all hopped up on sugar and it was, after all, Halloween.)

A fabulous day… not too spooky. But insanely fun, nonetheless. How was your Halloween??